The Portrait of a Lady was, like Roderick Hudson, begun in Florence, during three months spent there in the spring of 1879. Like Roderick and like The American, it had been designed for publication in The Atlantic Monthly, where it began to appear in 1880. It differed from its two predecessors, however, in finding a course also open to it, from month to month, in Macmillan's Magazine; which was to be for me one of the last occasions of simultaneous "serialization" in the two countries that the chang-ing conditions of literary intercourse between England and the United States had up to then left unaltered. It is a long novel, and I was long writing it; I remember being again much occupied with it, the following year, during a stay of several weeks made in Venice.
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Capturing the grandeur of a gracious, splendid Europe of wealth and Old World sensibilities, this glorious, complex novel has become a touchstone for a great writer"s entire literary achievement. From the opening pages, when the high-spirited American girl Isabel Archer arrives at the English manor Gardencourt, James"s luminous, superbly crafted prose creates an atmosphere of intensity, expectation, and incomparable beauty.
Isabel, who has been taken abroad by an eccentric aunt to fulfill her potential, attracts the passions of a British aristocrat and a brash American, as well as the secret adoration of her invalid cousin, Ralph Touchett, But her vulnerability and innocence lead her not to love but to a fatal entrapment in intrigue, deception, and betrayal. This brilliant interior drama of the forming of a woman"s consciousness makes THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY a masterpiece of James"s middle years.
